Old Mortality

Laughing, a little, at death, in “The Big C.”

Laura Linney as a middle-aged cancer patient trying to find herself.Credit Illustration by Robert Risko

With “The Big C,” Showtime adds to its collection of series centered on women who at first pass for normal but very soon reveal themselves to be in dire, most likely irreversible, trouble. These shows themselves sometimes get into trouble that they can’t get out of, often because of the very freedom that cable offers—plots take offbeat turns that lead into increasingly dull or absurd circles, or tonal shifts go much too far—or series last for a season or two longer than they should. In “Nurse Jackie,” which stars Edie Falco, it took Jackie’s husband two full seasons to realize that his wife was a habitual pill-popper. In “Weeds,” Mary-Louise Parker plays a housewife named Nancy, who turned to drug dealing as a way to make ends meet after her husband died unexpectedly; in the course of five seasons, the series, which began as a spirited satire of suburban life, showing just how thin the veneer of propriety is, became sloppy, repetitive, and incredible, its plot threads like drunken guests who refuse to leave.

“Weeds” starts its sixth season on August 16th, and the première episode of “The Big C,” which stars Laura Linney, follows immediately afterward. Showtime pitched the shows as a matched set—on its Web site Parker and Linney were pictured together, beside the words “Two Extraordinary Women. One Big Monday Night” and “Smart, Funny, Unique Points of View. Back to Back.” Below that was another image of the pair, with the caption “Think Nancy lives life on the edge? Wait ’til you meet Cathy.” It’s ill-advised to pay too much attention to a network’s promotional gambits, except as object lessons in what not to do. In this case, Showtime appears to be both overselling and mis-selling its new show. I’m not unsympathetic; the “big C” of the title, of course, refers to cancer, and the not-quite-rightness of the promos in some way reflects the awkwardness of addressing cancer in real life. But Cathy does not live on the edge; the conceit of the show is that she has no location until she learns that she has cancer, and her mission becomes to find and explore the emotional center of her existence, to discover who she really is.

We’re not in the examining room with Cathy when she’s told that she has incurable melanoma. We first see her in her yard, in suburban Minneapolis, at the beginning of summer. She has hired a contractor to build a pool in her postage-stamp-size front yard—a folly that the pool man talks her out of, suggesting a hot tub instead. There’s a nervousness in her manner, but also a determination, as we see when a man on a motor scooter tootles into the driveway and she gives him a cold welcome. It’s her husband, Paul, played by Oliver Platt, and the diverting sight of Platt pulling into a driveway on a Vespa is a sign that—probably—Paul has grabbed all the attention in the marriage, that it’s all about him. (Platt’s funny entrance is also a sign that “The Big C” is going to be able to deliver, at least to some extent, on its promise of being a comedy. But then I’ve never been able to resist Platt, except once, a couple of years ago, when he played Nathan Detroit in a Broadway revival of “Guys and Dolls,” and gave a performance that was strangely rote.) Paul has been staying at his sister’s, because Cathy has kicked him out of the house. We’re not sure why, and neither is he. In the next scene, she’s in her dermatologist’s office, where she’s free and flirty, kicking her legs the way she used to do as a child in her family’s swimming pool and mock-chiding the handsome young Dr. Todd (Reid Scott) for not noticing her breast when it’s partially revealed by an opening in her gown.

In a sense, “The Big C” really begins when Cathy, who is forty-two, tells Dr. Todd that she’s going to forgo treatment. Jokingly, she says that she likes her hair too much to lose it, then, looking off into a mirror and inspecting her face, she adds, “My nose—now, if you told me I was going to lose my nose.” She gives him a tight, fake smile; she’s acting, because she doesn’t know what else to do. Dr. Todd doesn’t know, either—and in lieu of wisdom he hands her brochures offering guidelines and solace. “You are not alone,” one of them promises. Cathy is amused by his awkwardness—more concerned about how he’s feeling than she is about her own turmoil. By not accepting treatment, Cathy is able to keep her disease secret. Why exactly, or even why inexactly, Cathy, who has a child, a surly teen-ager named Adam (Gabriel Basso), and an obnoxious brother, Sean (John Benjamin Hickey), as well as a husband, chooses to hide her illness is not illuminated, at least in the first three episodes. (There will be thirteen this season.) This worries me, as the trope of secrecy came close to ruining “Nurse Jackie” and made me very impatient with the first season of AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” in which a man who finds out that he has lung cancer keeps the news from his family for an implausibly long time. It’s unfair to the other characters, and it’s unfair to viewers, who are blocked from fully getting to know them.

“The Big C” was created by Darlene Hunt, an actress, standup comedian, writer, and producer, after a meeting with Vivian Cannon, who is one of the many producers of the series; Hunt, describing its genesis, has said that Cannon told her, “I think it’s time for a cancer comedy.” Tonally, the series seems to owe much to Jenny Bicks, its showrunner, who worked on “Sex and the City” for years and created “Men in Trees,” a sort of “Sex and the Big Woods,” which starred Anne Heche as a writer who moved to a small town in Alaska. (I liked “Men in Trees,” but no one else did, apparently; it was cancelled after two seasons.)

As accurate and sensitive as Linney’s performance may be—in just a couple of seconds her face can display an entire episode’s worth of emotion and reflection and conflict—she and the other characters come across to me as puppets, avatars of the writers’ preoccupations. We’re told, many times, that Cathy used to be a stick-in-the-mud and is only now opening up to life—but what little we know of her contradicts the notion that she never spoke up and never went after what she wanted. The rather too neatly packaged, maddeningly boyish Paul good-naturedly leaves the house to allow Cathy to have time alone and good-naturedly begs to be let back in. In one scene, he comes over to the house to collect a supply of socks; he takes the whole drawer from the dresser and carries it off, holding it under one arm as he drives away on his Vespa, unaware that half the contents are spilling out onto the street. It’s funny, but it’s too cute a dismissal of Paul’s frustration. Sean, Cathy’s brother, is homeless on purpose—on principle—and revels in being filthy and in eating discarded food, and, despite how exhausting such a life would be in reality, he’s portrayed as a happy hobo, with endless reserves of mental energy for criticizing his sister, and a devoted girlfriend who holds down a job at Whole Foods. Cathy is a high-school history teacher; in a summer-school class she’s teaching, she takes on one of her students, Andrea (Gabourey Sidibe), as an improvement project, trying to get her to lose weight. Sidibe gives no depth to this smart-mouthed, well-defended fat girl; she’s a cartoon. Cathy, to further illustrate the breaking down of boundaries in her life, starts a friendship with Marlene (Phyllis Somerville), a cranky old woman planted across the street by central casting, who, with all her loved ones gone, is essentially waiting to die.

There are odd little touches in the show that somehow pierce, like a shot of Marlene playing solitaire on a tray table in front of the TV. There’s a roll of Necco wafers on the table as well—which tells us something about what Marlene likes in life, and that she still has her pleasures. But, in general, there’s a pat, familiar quirkiness to “The Big C” that keeps you at a remove from it, and too many easy appeals to your emotions. At the end of one episode, Ingrid Michaelson’s sad-wise ballad of loss, “Keep Breathing,” plays, and if it rings a bell that’s because it was also used at the end of an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy,” when a character was left at the altar. You could put that song at the end of an episode of “I Love Lucy” and it would make you weep. Still, with Linney at the heart of “The Big C,” there’s reason to think that the series will improve. “Cancer is not a gift,” Cathy says, rejecting the adage of some support-group members who chase her around trying to convert her, but Linney is. ♦

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.